Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters – Part 4

In a previous essay in this space, it was proposed that reviewers who yearn for more strong female characters in science fiction frequently mistake strength for masculinity.

That essay argued that by the nature of male and female biology, a certain stereotypical psychology and set of virtues, priorities and values was necessary and desirable to differentiate the sexes and increase their joy in each other.

The virtues of men are called masculinity; the virtues of women are called femininity. The argument given there was that females can be strong and should be portrayed in stories as strong in the way that is particular to women, but not in the way that is particular to men. What writers should not do, so the previous essay argued, is merely give female characters manly characteristics and call that ‘strong’.

So far, in none of these essays, have I mentioned what the objection is to the effort to making these masculinized glamor-model Amazons into main characters.

I have said I have no objection to Supergirl, who is Kryptonian, and stronger than any mortal, and no objection to Wonder Woman, who is, er, an Amazon. Not only do I have no objection to Batgirl either when played by Yvonne Craig or when drawn by Bruce Timm and voiced by Tara Strong, I actually have an unsightly crush on her.

I have no objection to Mary Sue style wish-fulfillment characters who are good at everything and loved by all men. I do not see them as different from James Bond style wish- fulfillment characters who are good at everything and loved by all women.

I have no objection to angst-ridden leather-clad buxom vixen in highheeled boots fighting her werewolf ex-lover not in highheeled boots with her silver switchblade on the back of her flaming Harley-Davidson motorcycle in the moonlight on a storm-drenched burning train-trestle collapsing beneath the roaring unmanned freight train carrying jet fuel and nitroglycerine bearing down on her. Will she be able to stab the handsome brute in time to swan-dive to safety into the raging piranha-filled and ice-choked river far below, and still find forgiveness and love, before the inevitable explosive break-up of the Transcontinental Railway and her relationship with her brutally handsome demon-lover?

Who am I to criticize any of this? I mean, good grief, I watched RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION and almost enjoyed it. (I actually have rather plebeian tastes. Albeit I suppose a real plebeian would not know the word plebeian. He would use the phrase the hoi polloi instead.)

So what is my objection?

My objection is to falseness, insincerity, propaganda, bad drama, bad art, and treason against the muses. My objection is to using art for propaganda purposes. My objection is to Politically Correct piety. My objection is to the Thought Police.

My objection is to the spirit of totalitarianism.

For about ten years now, I have been writing and posting essays and articles on my electronic journal, and in all that time, I have been subjected to the Leftist mob tactics of mass hatred once and once only. It was the time I mocked the Sci-Fi Channel for kowtowing to Political Correctness. My motive for objecting was perfectly clear to everyone: I would like to write without censorship, formal or informal, based on political considerations. Formal censorship is state enforced; informal is enforced by organized mob-tactics, minority pressure groups, yelling, screaming, boycotts, hysteria and general bullying.

Because I would like to write without informal censorship interfering with my livelihood, I objected to Sci-Fi channel, or anyone in my field, surrendering to the minority pressure groups screaming and yelling and mob-tactics and bullying. So I mocked the Sci-Fi channel for encouraging the bullies by bowing the knee to them.

And in return the mob tried to bully me, of all people. As if I give a tinker’s damn for the opinions of these yowling halfwits. (There was exactly one person of the seven hundred or so who wrote in to me who seemed sincerely offended, and to him I apologized. To remaining six hundred and ninety-nine or so, I offered defiance in public, and in private prayed for their fool souls, hoping despite all appearances they were not damned fools.)

This taught me a lesson, but not the one the mob organizers wanted to teach. It taught me what they were afraid of. Not of me: no one can be afraid of a fat and balding nearsighted science fiction writer with a dull swordcane.

Nor were they offended by calling sodomy a sexual perversion, which I have done frequently before and since, never eliciting a single angry comment in reply, or attracting the slightest notice.

Since my legions of drug-maddened terror troops are all stranded on Salusa Secondus, the third planet of Gamma Piscium, 138 lightyears away, surely the mobsters of Political Correctness are not afraid of any physical force I can bring to bear. Neither am I in a position to deny any man any economic opportunities, nor am I influential enough to provoke public opinion or create any controversy. I doubt I could even do as much myself against them as they have done to me, such as hack a Wikipedia page or send around an open letter and expect it to be published and reprinted.

To explain what they are afraid of, I am afraid I have to explain something of the pathology of Leftism.

They actually think they are fooling us.

No, stop laughing. I will give you a moment to catch your breath again.

They think we think they care about gays and lesbians and blacks and women and Jews, and that their motive is compassion for all these poor oppressed groups…

Please stop laughing. I will give you another moment.

Now they know what their real motives are: to give themselves a sense of greatness which they actually do not deserve by thinking that they fought for civil rights that they actually oppose, out of compassion which they do not have for victims of utterly imaginary hardships and oppressions.

Am I being unfair? Remind me of the last time a group of feminists rioted outside of a Saudi Embassy.

They want what they have not earned. I do not mean monetary earnings. Their socialism, the craving for the unearned in the economic sphere, is not the main thrust of their psychopathology, it is a side effect. I mean spiritual earnings. They want self-esteem without the effort of doing anything worthy of esteem. They yearn for the palm of martyrdom without actually suffering the pain of being a martyr in the same way they want the crown of righteousness without actually being right.

My theory is that the schoolgirlish overreaction prompted by my comment had nothing to do with the particular topic of gay characters in Sci Fi shows. My theory is that the unadmitted reason for the degree of hostility in that one case was that I happened accidentally to tell the truth about them.

They are censors. The Politically Correct are Thought Policemen.

They do not think it is evil if a man commits crimes; for them, evil is a matter of thinking the wrong thoughts. Hence, Bill Clinton can abuse women without limit, but if he mouths the correct thought in reference to abortion, the feminists love him. Hence, Mrs Chaney can be loving and compassionate toward her gay sister, but if she disapproves of gay marriage, she is the same as a Nazi yearning to exterminate the Jews.

‘Censors’ is perhaps not the right word. In ancient Rome, the office the Censor, in addition to counting the numbers of the tribes and orders for voting, was to bring public shame upon behavior unbecoming to Roman dignity. Later, the office was to bring shame upon books thought heretical or immoral or deleterious to the public order, or redact, or forbid them.

What they are is anticensors: the Politically Correct try to bring shame onto books thought orthodox or moral or insufficiently deleterious to the public order. If a book does not promote sexual perversion in a sufficiently flattering and fulsome way, our anticensors hold it up to public shame.

A single example should suffice. Nothing is more wholesome and decent than a Disney children’s film. Here is an example of the Left trying to hold the wholesome and decent up to shame.

Savor, for a moment, dear reader, the absolute wrongness, the twisted perversity, of holding Disney Princesses up to scorn, as being sinister agents of the oppression of little girls.

Now, these self-anointed Thought Police would have no appeal if they admitted their true motivations, even to themselves. They need rationalizations, they need excuses, they need a mask.

The mask is compassion for the downtrodden.

Now, if you look through all human history, you will not find a single instance where the Leftists have actually helped the downtrodden, but many instances of the Left enthusiastically trampling the downtrodden, and grinding the faces of the poor into the dirt. That is the mental image which causes the Leftists their semi-sexual leg-tingles of sadistic lust: they want to see the human face trampled forever beneath their bootheel.

The examples of Cuba, China, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany should be sufficient warning of what the true motives are behind movements like Occupy Wallstreet, or what the moblike anger of the Ku Klux Klan, which formed the military arm of the defeated Democrat Party after their defeat in the South, can do when its grip on the levers of power goes unchecked.

A reasonable objection to make at this point is that the Fabian style socialists do not want violence. Clement Attlee managed to bring postwar Britain to adopt all the same economic and social policies as Mussolini’s fascist Italy, after all, without firing a shot, without making any arrests.

An even more reasonable objection is that nearly all Leftists think of themselves and talk of themselves and tell narratives about themselves where they are kind and compassionate and softhearted and filled with pity and brimming with the milk of human kindness, and so violence is that farthest thing from their mind.

Then they explain why Che Geuvara is a hero, why George Washington is not so much a hero, why Castro’s Cuba has free health care, and why the guillotine was necessary because the aristocrats and the Jews are enemies of the people, and you cannot make an omelet without murdering 259,000,000 million people in war, pogroms, and government-orchestrated famines.

So they might not approve of killing the victims of Communism by the millions, but they strongly, strongly object to you criticizing Communism.

After all, Castro and Che and Mao and Stalin murdered more people that Attila the Hun, but Senator McCarthy terrified self-important Hollywood people by following legitimate evidence indicating that the State Department was infiltrated by Soviet Agents, and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was discovered that each and every person McCarthy accused by guilty of exactly that which he accused them… UH … So, this means McCarthy was such a bad person, you cannot criticize Che or Castro or Stalin. Ronald Regan was the real terrorist, and may have been a madman.

In other words, not all Leftists are violent, but Leftists are blind to violence on their side, because whatever their side does is not judged by moral standards.

Hence in the PC cult worldview, violence is permitted when it serves the cause, but not necessary. Violence is merely icing on the cake, an extra, something in which to indulge when and if opportunities permit, such as among barbaric Russians who passively will endure it, but easily eschewed when opportunity does not permit, such as among civilized Englishmen who might well take up arms if provoked, as Englishmen, judging by their history, are wont to do.

Violence is not the point of Political Correctness.

The central point of Political Correctness is faith.

It is a religious faith, similar to Christianity and growing out of her, but opposed to its host organism and seeking forever to destroy her.

Leftists will trace their roots back to Marx or to the left hand seats of the French Assembly during and before the time of the French Revolution, but the transformative and utopian spirit reaches back to Cromwell and the Puritans. The Puritans in their early days were the arrogant intellectual elite precisely like our current ones, and it was bishops, not beer, to which they objected.

The Puritans gave birth to the Unitarians who gave birth to the Progressives which gave birth to the modern Left, which takes little or no inspiration from the French Revolution. The religious and crusading impulse of the Puritans, the hatred of Christmas, of worldly wealth, of Jews, of Catholics, all of those things remain.

What the Puritans wanted was totalitarianism. The Catholic Church wanted the secular power separate from the spiritual power, and always has, and always will, and the Church always grants her children freedom to make their own judgment in any thing where God has not spoken. The Puritans want no freedom at all, no latitude. Teetotaling and Prohibition and living without private property and that sort of rigorousness has never been a Catholic thing. Just ask the Irish.

The Church has always allowed and encourage those called to a special spiritual adventure to live without worldly pleasures or worldly goods, but never demanded each and every one of us dress in broadcloth like the Puritans year round, rather than just for Lent. The Church demands modesty from her daughters, but not the head-to-toe veil of the Islamic Fascists or the austere unisex drabs of the Maoists.

The Puritan plan was to have the King of England be the Pope, to combine the secular and spiritual power, and when that failed, to establish a utopia in the New World. The Church says there is no paradise before Doomsday. The Church says Man cannot save himself without the grace of Christ. The Puritans say some men are born elect, and cannot be damned, and others are born depraved, and cannot be saved. So to create utopia, all that is required is to give all spiritual and temporal power to the Elect, the elite, the enlightened. Does that sound familiar?

I am emphasizing the spiritual roots of Political Correctness to support the argument that PC is fundamentally a religious movement, a faith tradition, a cult, and not a political movement except in a trivial sense.

Like all faiths, the cult has certain articles of faith. Like all heresies, this cult takes the main propositions of the traditional historic Christian faith for granted, and these are its only source of strength and only source of appeal. The concern for the poor, the widow, the downtrodden, the belief of the brotherhood hence the equality of all men, all this comes from Christian thought: there is no corresponding doctrines to these among the Stoics or Aristotelians or Neoplatonists, and the opposite is preached by those who follow Confucius or those who believe in Karma and in the caste system.

Like all heresies, this cult rejects vehemently other propositions of the Christian faith, and anathematizes them not just as bad opinions, but as an evil to be vilified in absolute terms.

Unlike other heresies, the cult rejects God and the supernatural altogether, and presents itself as if it is not a heresy, not a cult, not a religion, and not based on faith.

It claims to be based on ironclad scientific reasoning of the latest and most intellectually sound and objective sort.

Please stop laughing or I will never finish.

One of the articles of faith of this religion is that it is not a religion and their conclusions are the product of clear and logical thinking, or perhaps the product of pellucid clarity of pure motives and highminded compassion, and that to disagree with the articles of faith is a sign, not of lack of faith, but a lack of intelligence, education, or compassion.

They think they are smarter than us.

These undereducated boobs who cannot follow a syllogism of three steps, who do not speak a word of Greek or Latin, who do not know the difference between Arianism and Aryanism, who have never read ORIGIN OF SPECIES or DAS KAPITAL or THE REPUBLIC and who do not even know the intellectual parentage of all their ideas, these vaunting cretins whose arguments consist of nothing but tiresome talking points recited by rote and flaccid ad hominem, whose opinions are based on fashion, they, of all people, think they are smarter than the rest of the world.

Yes, you can go ahead and laugh at that one. I’ll wait.

It is merely a fact that no Politically Correct policy has ever had the outcome planned. These are not stopped clocks who are correct twice a day: the PC cultists always, always, always, side with whatever is the most evil, illogical, destructive, nihilistic, perverted, and foolish measure in any debate or decision of policy. PC ruins everything it touches.

Instead of providing an endless list of PC schemes, ideas and policies that have failed, since they all fail, I will issue a general challenge to any reader who wishes to dispute the obvious to list the PC success stories. List one. A single example will overturn the universal affirmative. Knock yourself out.

You will find that the candidates on the list are one of two things:

First, the cultists will claim credit for something they opposed, such as the Civil Rights Movement, which was a Republican movement, spearheaded by a Christian minister named King, aided by Nixon, voted into effect by a Republican majority, to overcome Democrats who stood in schoolhouse doors or turned firehoses on peaceful protesters or lynched blacks. Meanwhile the NRA was arming blacks with handguns, Saturday Night Specials, that the Democrats tried, often with success, to remove.

Second, once the true depth of the evil is undeniable, the cultists will deny something that they once supported, such as Stalin’s Soviet Union (of which Lincoln Steffens said “I have seen the future – and it works”) was really actually honest-Injun a truly true example of the true faith after all. It was not REALLY socialist. They did not really try hard enough. They did not spill enough blood. We need to try again and try harder.

These two factors acting in concert create what I call the unreality principle. The unreality principle is the principle that whatever is truth is called not true and whatever is not true is called true. It does not matter what the topic is. The point is to break the mind of its ability to focus on rational thought.

This conditioning of the brain to flinch away from reason and embrace unreason is done by making the unreality principle the paramount moral and ethical principle in the cult. It is the principle that trumps all others.

So the first article of faith of Political Correctness, the one from which it takes its name, is that to think or speak what is factually correct, that is, whatever is really real, is morally wrong if it harms the party or the cause.

Moral righteousness consists of thinking and speaking falsehoods and nonsense-words that are factually incorrect but politically correct, that is, by slogans, jeering, noise, commotion, jingles, hullaballoo, alarums, and cacophony which aid the party or the cause.

And it is only moderately meritorious to speak small falsehoods (such as blaming the failure of the Soviet Union on the need of the idealistic revolutionaries to arm themselves against the vicious attacks from the capitalist West) but truly meritorious, because it is a true sign of deep faith that resists all fact and ignores all logic, to tell truly huge, outrageous, utterly unbelievable lies (such as saying all opposition to Obama is racist, or saying the National Socialist German Worker’s Party was not Socialist, or saying Capitalism produces poverty, or saying the only truth is that there is no truth, or saying that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist).

Those who take up the pen to argue against this endless drip of nonsense are often baffled by the fact that the PC cultist, when discussing any other matter aside from one of their articles of faith, is capable of humanity, wit, logic, and seems like a normal human being; but once on one of the subjects where this mental disease has taken hold, the cultist will and must say things no one is stupid enough to believe but which no one is dishonest enough to lie about: it is lies on the level of saying your head is a pumpkin, things a child would not believe.

These cultists are not monsters. Why, then, do they say things that anyone can see are utter evil, utter nonsense, utter folly?

What makes kindly gray-haired old grandmas who act like humans at all other times suddenly curse the United States for opposing the spread of International Communism to South America, and unable to believe that the communist assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy, but instead think a Rightwing conspiracy or an evil redneck city in Texas is to blame?

Once might as well as why Eve and Adam, our first parents, favored of Heaven so highly, and blessed with endless life and lordship over the gardens of paradise thought that disobedience to God would get them some greater good, such as equality with God, a good that God whether through cruelty or unfairness, wished to deny them.

The cultists will tell you their motive. Their motive is kindness. They want to help.

The cultists are shocked by the unhappiness and unfairness of human life on earth.

But that is not what makes them cultists. Christians are also shocked by the unhappiness and unfairness of human life on earth, and they explain that shock by reference to the Fall of Man, and seek the solution of the world’s pain in a supernatural power from beyond the world, seeing all men’s devising must fail.

What makes an otherwise rational men into PC-cultists is that they do not believe in the Fall of Man; they believe in the Interrupted Perfection of Man.

They believe perfection of paradise is within arm’s reach, perhaps less than 25 years away, but that the achievement of this eschaton is thwarted by the folly and inertia of the uneducated masses, and by the sinister conspiracy of the malign vested interests favored by the current world-system.

This conclusion is not as bizarre as first seems. The Politically Correct cultists see that reason and decency and honesty have not solved that unfairness nor that unhappiness. Therefore (so their reasoning goes) reason and decency and honesty, also called factual correctness, are worthless.

Disobedience to reason and decency and honesty seem to the cultists to deny to them some greater good that reality has always denied them. It is the same logic Eve used when reaching for the apple. They want to be gods, or, what is the next best thing, the fathers of the New Man who is destined to occupy the shining towers of Utopia.

And ergo the cultist concludes that if factual correctness and loyalty to truth has always failed throughout all history to produce perfect utopia, then political correctness and loyalty to falsehood and outrageous lies must serve in its place.

This thought is like an addictive drug, a drug that gives pleasure only the first time it is used, and thereafter only produces pain if it is withdrawn. After the first euphoric days of the Movement, the cultist quickly finds he cannot get what he wants.

He does not conclude from this that utopia is a self-contradictory and appallingly stupid and Escheresquely impossible idea. He merely feels frustration.

Then he finds a scapegoat for his frustration, usually some harmless bystander, perhaps a Jew, perhaps an Investment Banker, perhaps the Pope, perhaps his father, and blames him.

This scapegoating does not necessarily involve a conspiracy theory of history, but it must have the mood and savor of a conspiracy theory: it must assume action in concert of many groups widely dispersed through time and space, whether that group is called Capitalists or the Patriarchy or The Establishment or The Man or what have you.

If the cultist is frustrated, and if the frustration cannot be admitted honestly to be because of the foolishness of his goals, then the frustration of his goals must be blamed on an opponent, a group of wrong-thinking people who have some base and vile motive for maintaining all the injustice and unfairness of the world. The wrong-thinking people are sadists, who thwart the utopia because and only because they want people to be unhappy. The wrong-thinking people are witches on whom all bad harvests are to be blamed.

With the freedom from facts and logic which is the core of Cultist thinking comes a number of defense mechanisms too numerous to list here. I will mention only two.

The first mechanism is placing ideology over logic. Because logic is not a priority, the cult does not demand uniformity of belief even on the core doctrine. The Cult has a number of propositions or special interests it serves, and loyalty to any one of them makes you a cult member, so you get the benefit of unearned sensations of moral superiority and self-congratulation on your kindness, even while other members of the cult are carrying on to do the opposite of whatever you support.

Your loyalty is still to them, and you attack anyone who attacks them. That is the bargain.

This is why some PC Cultists can even admit the communism is a mad, bad and evil, but they also must think McCarthy and Reagan are even worse. Some cultists can think that Islamic terrorists are bad, but they also must think that criticism or mockery of Islam is even worse. That is why Gay activists and Islamic terrorists can agree to attack their mutual foe, Christendom, despite their mutual hatred for each other.

The second mechanism is placing ideology over honesty. Whenever the lies become too obvious, the cult denies itself, changes its name, and the shadow takes another form and grows again. It cannot call itself Liberalism once it becomes too obvious that the cult yearns with semi-sexual lust for totalitarianism, and seeks totalitarian control over all media, all communication, all thought. It cannot call itself Progressive once it is clear that the progress is toward the edge of a cliff. They cannot even call themselves Left once it is clear they have no relation to the left-seated liberal delegates in the French assembly. They cannot call themselves socialist once everyone sees what socialism does to the economy, to human honesty, to self-reliance, to manhood, to humanity. They cannot call themselves communists once it is clear they have no intention of sharing all property in common, but instead given Dachas to the elite party members and giving slums or Siberians gulags to the depraved under-men. This is why the cult keeps changing its name.

There is no center to it. There is no Pope in charge of this antichurch of antihuman belief. It is a loose collection of gibberish which has nothing in common except for the psychological effect on the cultists. They get to feel good about themselves as morally superior while thinking they are saving the earth while doing everything imaginable to sink more and more deeply into moral depravity, infanticide, euthanasia, sexual perversion, theft, half-lies and whole lies, revolutions, riots, violence, wars.

It offers complete freedom from morality and reason while also offering to them the laurels and ermine trimmed robe granted to the saints and saviors and beauty queens.

Everything is permitted to cultists because the cult enemy, the witches or wrongthinking people, have no rights and merit no respect, no, not even the respect due an honorable opponent, or due a man honestly mistaken.

It goes without saying that if utopia were possible, anything done to achieve utopia were be permissible; and likewise any opposition to utopia would be an evil so monstrous as to be beyond explanation. That is why the cultists are not just appalled by opposition to their featherbrained and bloodthirsty schemes, their desire to loot and lie and give the guillotine work to do, they are honestly baffled by it.

The same reason that utopia, by being so valuable, permit any sacrifice needed to reach utopia, and makes all opposition into devils and madmen, so too does an emergency permit large sacrifices allegedly for the duration and silences all opposition as being impermissible given the limited time and the severity of the emergency.

This is why the cultist are always shouting at the top of their lungs.

This is why the best health care system in history, with little or nothing wrong with it, which, perhaps, to be made even better, could have used a few minor tweaks, is described as a crisis demanding immediate action.

A crisis is like a miniature utopia, in that the severity allows foolish actions, like passing a law without reading it first. And any objection to solving the crisis can be denounced as being prompted by an evil desire to prolong or deepen the crisis, a wrongheadedness and willful blindness to the looming severity of the coming disaster.

The end of the world is always immanent for the Cult. The stakes are always all or nothing, world salvation or world damnation. Nothing can be discussed calmly.

Nothing can be discussed calmly for the same reason there is no loyal opposition nor honorable rivals: everything opposed to the cult must be described as absolutely bad and evil in all ways.

(Even science fiction writers, like yours truly, who speak against the cult cannot simply be making an innocent mistake, they must be both uneducated and untalented in the writing of science fiction. Correct political opinion seems also to grant all talents and all graces.)

The only way to escape being accused of being a wrong-thinking person is to denounce other wrong-thinking persons with the vehemence and correct formula of speech to show that one believes the cultists. The formulae change from decade to decade and year to year (Colored to Black to Afroamerican to African American to whatever) so that no one can be a cultist without paying close attention to the cult and its fashions.

And, like the Gnostic before them, the cult has an inner and an outer circle. The inner circle are the ones who half-believe their own lies, and the outer circle are the ones who the inner circle deceives and misleads.

And this is one of the best defenses of the cult: the outer circle members like the sensation of belonging to a group, and like the flattering of speeches and stories and movies telling them, over and over, that they are smarter than average, more compassionate than average, and that the witches and wrong-thinking persons are to blame for all the crop failures and everything else wrong with your life.

Did you get fired from your job? When all things are controlled by the state, no more unjust firings will happen. Did your boyfriend break up with you? Once feminism is taught to one and all, an era of mutual understanding and equality will grow, where men will no longer be unfair to women. Do you have a longing for something hard to name? This is because the witches are keeping you from your true heritage.

The Jews are the blame for the Fatherland losing the Great War. The White Man is to blame for my poverty. He makes more than I. He is handsomer than I. He is happy and I am not. Vote for me, and I will stop the witches from cursing the climate and creating a hole in the ozone layer. By November, the Utopia should be up and working. But I need more power over your lives because I am an elite expert and wiser and more compassionate than you, and I will stop the wrong-thinking people, who are all-powerful witches.

And on and on and on. It is a formula that explains all failures and promises all success and shifts blame to the wrong-thinking people, and the beauty of the cult is that facts never, ever get in the way.

That is the strategic overview of the Cult belief of Political Correctness.

What has this to do with science fiction?

Nothing. The Cult is totalitarian. It does not want to control merely your beliefs about God and angels or your beliefs about race relations or your beliefs about the proper forms of law and government or your beliefs about questions of capital and labor or your beliefs about relations between the sexes or your beliefs about the relations between man and his environment or your beliefs about your diet and your smoking habits. They want to control your beliefs on purely scientific questions, such as the role of human activity in relation to global temperatures over the next century, or the average intelligence quotients of various racial groups.

They want to control EVERYTHING. The totality. Your whole mind and whole heart and whole soul, during your every waking moment.

And they want you to believe – this is also a central tenant of their dogma – that they do not want you to believe anything, that their beliefs are nothing but the independent conclusions of disinterest scientific thinkers who just so happen to agree in perfect lockstep on all these matters.

The central dogma of the Cult of Political Correctness is that there is no cult, and no dogma. The dogmatists are the other people, the wrong-thinking people, the witches whose malign magic powers somehow cause utopia not to be born.

So the Cult is interested in science fiction only because science fiction exists and the Cult demands total control over every aspect of human life down to the last nuance (while denying that it makes that demand).

Ah, but is it not true that science fiction back in the unenlightened days before our messiahs of female equality Hugh Hefner and Bill Clinton, writers and editors treated women as secondary characters, and female authors where hunted down by Senator McCarthy and his Sardaukar Terror Troops?

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.